From Dorm Room to Classroom: Effectively Responding to Critiques from Friends, Peers, and Professors

On most campuses, traditional moral views on sex and marriage are met with indifference or hostility, and their proponents are deemed ignorant or crazy, if not malign. In such worlds, where the rejection of traditional mores is the prevailing orthodoxy, sexual liberationists can seem to have reason and commons sense on their side. This is an illusion: as 2,400 years of critical reflection show, the most coherent ethical account of sex and marriage is the one rejected in the 1950s by Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and other forefathers of sexual-revolutionary ideology. But anyone hoping to show this on college campuses today faces an uphill battle, and sometimes opponents too complacent for engagement. Even friends who would be sympathetic sometimes become distant and similarly question the worth of so public a commitment to these traditional mores. In this breakout session, Sherif and Cassy discuss these challenges and offer ways to effectively respond to friends and opponents, with a focus on how to level the rhetorical playing field for a fair and robust discussion of the rational merits of traditional values — within and outside the classroom, with peers and professors alike.